In addition to updating the wording of its so-called hate-speech policy, Google says the new policy can now be applied at a page level, instead of the site level. It’s a key change for the more than 2 million AdSense publishers that also minimizes the impact of a broader policy on Google’s own bottom line.

As we’ve previously reported, many sites — including the kinds of hyper-partisan political sites that proliferated and grew in popularity in the US over the past year — have become skilled in walking right up to the line of Google’s hate speech policy without violating it. Rick Summers, Google’s global lead for publisher policies, told Marketing Land earlier this month that his team noticed a trend of increasingly aggressive tones from people feeling freer to lodge personal attacks and express hateful thoughts online. As part of a full policy review, Summers said, “we got a lot of information that we needed to expand” the hate speech policy — as it did in November with the misrepresentative content policy, in part to address the growing problem of sites impersonating legitimate news sites”.